ABSTRACT
This study deals with the aesthetics of Italian opera, not the analysis of its scores. This is to say that it is less concerned with the operas of Bellini and his contemporaries than with the ideas behind them; the ideas and attitudes that caused them to be the way they are. This has been undertaken in the belief that the understanding of opera, and indeed music generally, should be done in the light of an adequate knowledge of the culture from which it springs; in particular some acquaintance with what contemporary listeners expected from it. This has, so far as it has been possible to discover, never been done before. This is not in fact because the field in general has been neglected; indeed there have been a very large number of writings on the music of Bellini. One bibliography compiled in 1923 lists no fewer than eight hundred and eighty-eight items; (1) and nearly all the significant contributions to Bellinian studies have come since that date. However, it has to be said that a great many of such writings have been of the nature of Italian omaggi, designed to venerate the composer, rather than to study his music and his context.
